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A Long-Distance Call

            They didn’t come for us; they came for the bacteria…and the dolphins.  The real prime specimens generated by our planet turned out to be bacteria and viruses.  In particular the common cold: a virus that cannot be effectively combated by any dependable means. 

This was centuries ago, long before the end of the world, but they had a perspective we did not have.  Then again, their minds were better equipped to handle logic than ours.  We were almost pure emotion to them and it fascinated them to the degree an almost entirely logical mind can be fascinated how completely irrational we were:  how we always, or nearly always, acted in our own self-interest, even when it was against our own self-interest; how we passively allowed ourselves to be governed by those intent on actively shortening the lifespan of our planet; how we sought love and conflict from the same persons; how we time after time acted against what our said intentions were; how we were willing to accept assured long-term losses for dubious short-term gains; how it was not ultimately apparent that, as a species, our strengths were greater than our liabilities.  So they took the dolphins instead.

            They were not solely logical, and they saw what discord we would bring with us:  they saw how the most capable and worthwhile of us were often the most ill intentioned; they saw how the ways to rise to positions of prominence were by and large morally dubious and that the capable ones that did not compromise in order to obtain power died on the vine.  They did not want us to take them to our leader; they didn’t want anything to do with our leaders.

            They briefly considered a “Sunday Punch,” a preemptive strike to make sure we didn’t get out of our atmosphere and cause any trouble or crusades; then they concluded that unless we shed those very qualities we would never make it out of our cosmic backwater anyway, so we were a sort of self-cleaning oven.

            They came back frequently to observe us, using us as a sort of school for their promising young to observe what occurs when abuse of emotion is taken to the extreme.  They took samples of most of our species as they went extinct, one by one.  At the end of the world they debated taking samples of the last specimens of humankind.  They already had a few dead and frozen samples.  They decided not to take us alive; we were too much trouble.